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I never thought I’d end up here, standing on the edge of a decision that feels both ridiculous and inevitable. It’s like staring at a box with DO NOT OPEN: Bad Decisions Inside stamped across the front, already knowing my hands will tear at the lid. Already knowing I’ll pry it open just to see how bad it can get.

I’m broke—not the latte-skipping, tightening-the-belt kind of broke, but the hollow, all-consuming kind. The kind of broke that eats away at your insides, makes you question the shape of your morals, smooths out the edges of what most people call acceptable. Desperation doesn’t crash down all at once; it seeps in, quiet and steady, until you’re choking on it, gulping for air. It tastes like shame. It tastes like I’m letting down not just myself but everyone who came before me, all those ancestors who clawed through history just to get me here, just to watch me drown in a mess of my own making.

But it didn’t start with money. The cracks in my life began long before that, a slow fracture widening over time. It started years ago, when my mother left. I was six. I still remember her—her hair, black and glossy like a crow’s wing, the smell of lilacs and cigarette

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smoke that lingered even after she was gone. She used to braid my hair, her hands quick and firm, pulling tight enough to make my scalp hum. Tight enough to feel like permanence, like something solid that wouldn’t come undone. But permanence wasn’t her thing.

One day, she packed a suitcase big enough to hold forever and walked out the door.

I sat on the steps, knees tucked to my chest, waiting for her to come back. I don’t know how long I waited. Long enough for the sky to darken, long enough to learn she never would.

My dad stayed, but in pieces, in fragments that didn’t add up to enough. He worked double shifts at the factory, his hands calloused and streaked with grease, his breath sour with whiskey. He wasn’t mean, just absent in ways that mattered. By ten, I was walking to the corner store to buy groceries because he wasn’t sober enough to do it. He’d shove a crumpled twenty into my hand and mutter, Knock yourself out, kid.

By twelve, I knew how to keep the lights on. I’d call the electric company myself, the numbers on the back of my dad’s credit card memorized and rolling off my tongue like a prayer. They never asked why a kid was calling, never questioned the small but mighty voice on the other end of the line. They didn’t care. As long as they got their money, the lights stayed on.

Numbers became my refuge. Clean, sharp, dependable. Numbers didn’t leave. They didn’t get drunk. They didn’t walk out with a suitcase or come home reeking of liquor. I was good at math—better than good. I built my life on it, a fortress made of equations, algorithms, sharp corners and clean lines. It was a promise: if I could just be precise enough, exact enough, maybe I could keep the chaos at bay.

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Accounting seemed like the logical path. Safe. Boring, but safe. I built my life around spreadsheets and formulas, around the certainty that numbers didn’t lie. Until they did. The mistakes started small—a decimal in the wrong place, a column misaligned. But they grew. Missed deadlines. Angry clients. I’d stay late, rechecking, triple-checking, running my fingers over the same rows and cells as if the answers might change. My boss didn’t care about my rituals, only the results. The pressure built, and my precision cracked under its weight. Eventually, I was fired. Unemployment is its own kind of hell.

Rent. Bills. A parade of due dates I couldn’t outrun. My brain gnawed at the problem like it could chew its way to a solution, turning it over and over until every angle was frayed. Borrowing money felt like begging. Job applications felt like flinging darts in the dark, the targets moving further away with every throw. What I needed wasn’t politically correct—I needed something that was immediate. Radical.

That’s when I remembered the TV segment, the woman with her flawless hair and a life draped in silk, funded by men old enough to be her father. Sugar daddies. At the time, I’d laughed at the absurdity of it, the glossy fiction of her ease. But now? Now it felt like a possibility.

Could I do it? Should I do it? The questions spiraled into equations: risks divided by rewards; costs subtracted from benefits. My brain, desperate for a foothold, clung to the math.

I didn’t look the part. Long legs, sure, but paired with a flat chest and hips that refused to curve, a body that felt like a compromise. My hair, wild and black like my mother’s, defied every effort to tame it, springing back no matter how much I pulled. My face was “quirky,”

which is what people say when they mean not beautiful, but just interesting enough. Still, surely someone out there had a niche for girls like me.

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I researched obsessively, the way I always do. Forums, reviews, spreadsheets comparing platforms. I settled on SDForMe.com—just reputable enough to feel safe, just sleazy enough to feel possible.

Signing up felt like undressing for an audience, each question pulling at my seams. Describe yourself. I stared at the empty box, the truth hovering like a weight: broke, anxious, spiraling.

Instead, I typed: Ambitious. Curious. Open to new experiences.

A lie, but a convincing one.

Next came the stats: height, weight, ethnicity. I hesitated before selecting “mixed race.”

It was true, on my mother’s side as she was half White, though I thought of myself as just Black. Still, I had just enough lightness in my skin, just the right type of hair, the right type of hobbies, the right type of demeanor that people in college used to call me “oreo.”

I hated it, resented it, but ignored it all the same. What could I say to that anyway? Thank you? Fuck you?

Then came the preferences: age range, income level, generosity. I adjusted the sliders like I was tuning a machine, trying to manufacture the perfect equation, one that balanced survival with dignity.

Finally, the photos. My awkward selfies glared back at me like evidence of failure. I analyzed them until I hated every angle, every shadow, until even the ones I could tolerate felt like betrayals. I chose a few that didn’t make me wince and uploaded them anyway.

When I hit submit, my chest tightened. I slammed the laptop shut and stared at the wall, the enormity of what I’d just done pressing down on me like the weight of a stranger’s gaze. My brain, relentless, looped through its litany of questions: What if no one responds? What if someone does? What if this spirals out of control? What if it works?

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The questions clawed at me, but the numbers were louder. Rent. Bills. The unrelenting weight of what I owed and couldn’t pay.

I’d opened the box. All I could do now was wait to see what spilled out.